Wednesday on CNN’s “At This Hour,” while discussing the State Department inspector general’s report finding that during her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton did not comply with the department’s policy, CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash said that this will “help her opponents in a big way.”
Bash said, “As a sports enthusiast, I’ll use a term you appreciate, unforced error. This is something that Hillary Clinton — many people who I talked to who support her just wring their hands and say, what were you thinking? This feeds directly into the narrative that her opponent, Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side, and ultimately Republicans led by Donald Trump in a general election, will be hammering her on. And in politics, it is the existing narrative and the ability by opponents to feed into that that is the most damaging. You see it time and time again. The narrative of course is, you hear Donald Trump doing it in only a way that he does, calling her ‘Crooked Hillary.’”
“The fact that she didn’t comply with the rules, that she appears to be doing things that maybe she thought she was above the rules or she’s different from the way everybody else should be,” Bash continued. “Now, she has lots of explanations, lots of ways she’s trying to say that she did what she thought was right, but at the end of the day when you have an independent investigation going on within the department that she ran saying that she shouldn’t have done several things, including taking her documents and then not giving them back for almost two years after she left, that’s going to help her opponents in a big way.”
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